Distributed Decision Making Report of a Workshop (1990) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix A: The Possibility of Distributed Decision Making
Appendix A: The Possibility of Distributed Decision Making
Pages 25-58
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From page 25... ...
. Drawing from the experience of different systems and from research in areas such as behavioral decision theory, psychology, cognitive science, sociology, and organizational development, the analysis suggests bow problems and possible solutions.
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For the past 20 to 30 years, behavioral decision theory has attempted to develop decision aids with a somewhat better chance of survival (Edwards, 1954, 1961; Exhort and Hogarth, 1981; Pitz and Sachs, 1984; Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein, 1977; Rappoport and Wallsten, 1972~. Its hopes are pinned on a mixture of prescriptive and descriptive research.
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From page 27... ...
Although it would be nice to make people over as model decision makers, the reality is that they have to be moved in gradual steps from where they are now. As behavioral decision theory grew, two of the first organizations to see itS potential as the foundation for new decision-aiding methods were the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research.
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From page 28... ...
Although it might have been tempting to take the (potentially flashy) technique and run with it, the program managers required regular interactions among their contractors, including psychologists, economists, decision theorists, operations researchers, computer scientists, consulting decision analysts, and even some practicing decision makers.
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The feeling that one knew all along what was going to happen leads one to be unduly harsh on past decisions (if it was obvious what was going to happen, then failure to select the best option must mean incompetence) and to be unduly optimistic about future decisions (by encouraging the feeling that things are generally well understoc)
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As a result, the values that they express are often highly (and unwittingly) sensitive to the exact way in which evaluation questions are posed, whether by survey researchers, decision aids, politicians, merchants, or themselves.
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facts most often focusing on the specific information and ignoring experience (Bar Hillel, 1980~. They can tell how similar a specific instance is to a prototypical case, yet not how important similarity is for making predictions-usually relying on it too much (Bar Hillel, 1984; Kahneman and Iversky, 1972~.
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From page 32... ...
for which the rule would dictate choosing the option that was selected meaning that it is hard to prove that the rule was not used; (c) expectation rules can often predict the outcome of decision-making processes even when they do not at all reflect the thought processes involved so that predicting behavior is not sufficient for understanding or aiding it (Fischhoff, 1982~.
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From page 33... ...
It Is not people, but their performance, that is shown in a negative light Indeed, in the history of the social sciences, the interest in judgmental biases came as part of a cognitive backlash to psychoanalysis, with fits dark interpretation of human foibles. The cognitive perspective showed how biases could emerge from honest, unemotional thought processes.
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Moreover, any model is written in something like a foreign language, with a somewhat strange syntax and vocabulary. Successful usage means being able to translate what one knows into terms that the modeling language (and the aid)
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Yet current modeling languages require the experts to summarize their knowledge in quantitative and sometimes unfamiliar terms, and they are ill suited to represent human behavior (such as that of the system's operators) (Fischhoff, 1988~.
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Addressing these situations is a logical next step for behavioral decision theory, although not one that it can take alone. Although the essential problem in command-and-control Is still individuals pondering the unknown, there are now rigid machines, rules, and doctrines in the picture, along with more fluid social relations.
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Although the distribution of decision-making authority might seem to be another distinguishing characteristic, we believe that it is trivially achieved in almost all human organizations. Few are able, even if they try, to centralize all authority tO make decisions.
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The form of what follows is a task analysis, which is the standard point of entry for human factors engineers, the specialists concerned with the performance of people in technical systems. Such analyses characterize systems in terms of their behaviorally significant dimensions, which must be considered when designing the system and adapting people tO it (Perrow, 1984~.
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From page 39... ...
The aids lo performance should also be those identified in the existing literature, such as checklists of options, multimethod value elicitation procedures, and integration help.3 A first complication for individual decision malting is the addition of uncertainty. With it come all the difficulties of intuitive judgment under uncertainty, such as the misperception of causality, overconfidence in one's own knowledge, and heunstic-induced prediction biases.
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False consensus refers to the erroneous belief that others share one's views (Nisbett and Ross, 1980~; pluralzsuc ignorance refers to the erroneous belief that one is the odd person out (Fiske and Taylor, 1984~. Both have been repeatedly documented; both can be treated if the threat is recognized and facing the discrepancy is not too painful Such problems arise because frequency of interaction can create a perception of completely shared models, when sharing is inevitably incomplete.
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If available on request, qualifications may slip the minds of decision makers who want clear-cut answers to their questions. Because it iS SO difficult lo tell when qualifications are not in order, such systems require careful design and their operators require careful training.4 Unless users have demonstrated mastery of the system, it may be appropriate to sacrifice sophistication for fluency.5 A final, behaviorally significant complication that can arise with twoperson distributed dec~sion-maldng systems is inconsistencies in the goals of the parties.
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The simplest level involves individuals with common goals, shared expenence, and hardened communication links. As before, having more people around means having the opportunity for more views to evolve and be heard.
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One aid to tracking these complex realities is to maintain formal models of the decision-making problems faced at different places. Even if these models could capture only a portion of those situations, comparing the models held at headquarters and in the field might provide a structured
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From page 45... ...
Depending on the organization's capabilities, one potential coping mechanism might be a communications protocol that emphasized staying in touch, even when there was nothing to say, in order to monitor reliability continually; another might be analyses of the backlash effect of actions or messages, considering how they discourage or restrict future communications (e.g., by suggesting the need for secrecy or revealing others' positions) ; another might be by reporting intentions along with current status, to facilitate projecting what incommunicant others might be doing; another might be creating a "black box" from which one could reconstruct what had happened before communications went down.
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From page 46... ...
Inherent limitations may include homogeneity of perspectives and skills, leaving the system relatively vulnerable to deeply shared misconceptions (what might be called "intellectual common-mode failures") and relatively devoid of the personnel resources need tO initiate significant changes (or even detect the need for them without very strong, and perhaps painful, messages from the environment)
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From page 47... ...
A full-blown version of this analysis would consider, at each stage, first, how the problems that arose in simpler systems were complicated or ameliorated and, second, what new problems arose. For each set of problems, it would try to develop a set of solutions based, as far as possible, on the available research literature in behavioral decision theory, cognitive psychology, human factors, communications research, or organizational theory.
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From page 48... ...
Given the difficulty of individual decision making, one must resist the temptation tO move on to other, seemingly more tractable problems. A second general conclusion is that many group problems may be seen as variants of individual problems or even as reflections of those problems not having been resolved.
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From page 49... ...
. A fourth family of principles proposes avoiding the human element either when it is convenient (because viable alternatives exist)
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The extensive body of human factors research is either unknown or is invoked at such a late stage in the design process that it can amount to little more than the development of warning labels and training programs for coping with inhuman systems. It is so easy to speculate about human behavior (and provide supporting anecdotal evidence)
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; (b) increasing the number of human factors-related regulations has complicated operators' job at the plant and created lucrative opportunities for operators to work as consultants to industry (thereby reducing the qualified labor force at the plants)
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Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Bar Hillel, M 1980 Abe base-rate fallacy in probability judgments Acta Psychologica 44:211-233.
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Behavioral decision theory: Processes of judgment and choice. Annul Reflow of Psychology 32:53~8.
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From page 54... ...
1978 Fault trees: Sensitivity of estimated failure probabilities to problem rep resentation Jown a l of Exp~r~al Psychology: Hum ~ Perc epion on d Perfomu~ce 4:330-344 1980 Knowing what you want: Measuring labile values. In 1: Wallsten, ea., Connive Processes us Choice and Decision Behavior.
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New York: Free Press. Jungermann, H
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1984 Behavioral decision theory. Annual Review of Psychology 35.
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Slovic, P., Fischho~, B., and Lichtenstein, S 1977 Behavioral decision theory.
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From page 58... ...
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission 1983 PRO Procedures Guide (NUREG/CR-2300~.
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